Man who found head finally finds peace

HOPEWELL TWP. — Bob Cacciabaudo, who found the severed head of Heidi Balch in Hopewell 24 years ago, now hopes the mutilated face he saw that day will be erased from his mind.

He hopes the horrid, jawless vision will be replaced by the pretty countenance of Balch, a New Yorker who finally was identified as the woman whose slashed off head was found near the seventh fairway of the Hopewell Valley Golf Club on March 5, 1989.

“That’s a day I certainly will never forget,” said Cacciabaudo, who would not comment to the press the day of the find and since has rarely spoken about it in public or private.

Cacciabaudo, 54, said he was playing golf with two friends when he teed off to the side of the fairway. On finding his ball he glanced toward the nearby stream and spotted the disembodied head.

“The best thing about seeing her picture today in The Trentonian is the fact that maybe I can get what I saw that day out of my mind,” said Cacciabaudo, a hairdresser and spa owner.

“She had no jaw and she had one and half teeth. It looked like someone took a machete to her and just chopped away.”

The chopped off legs of Balch were found 80 miles north of here in Lake Hopatcong, Morris County, 35 days after the Hopewell find. The rest of the corpse has never been found.

According to authorities, Balch is believed to have been murdered by serial killer Joel Rifkin, who murdered as many as 17 women from 1989 to 1993, but was only convicted of murdering nine. He is currently serving a 203-year sentence in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Clinton N.Y.

Following the discovery of the head, the Mercer County Medical Examiner determined that Balch, 25, had been killed and decapitated hours before the golfers found her remains.

The examiner also determined that the Balch had AIDS, which earned The Trentonian national notoriety for the headline on that story: HEAD HAD AIDS. In the story, the reporter suggested the victim “may have avenged her own death if the murderer was splashed by her blood,” and years later authorities confirmed that Rifkin had tested positive for HIV.

Rifkin also told cops the prostitute whose head he chopped off had been one of his first victims. By the time he was caught, Rifkin no longer was taking his victims’ bodies far out of New York. He was finally caught when a cop stopped his pickup and looked under a tarp in the bed to see a body he’d been driving around with for days.

Cacciabaudo, who lives in Titusville, has two children, ages 6 and 2, who had never heard about what happened to their Dad at age 30 that chilly Sunday on the golf course. After the news came out on Tuesday night, he told them. One said “eww” and the other said “cool.”

“I just hope this provides some closure for her family,” which reported Blach missing in 2001, saying she had last been seen in 1995 — a mistaken sighting that helped baffle township detectives dealing with a 1989 murder.

Tracing nicknames and with help from police in New York, local investigators were able to track down Balch’s parents, whose DNA matched the victim’s. That happened, in fact, on March 3, nearly 24 years to the day of the finding of the Hopewell Head, which the anonymous victim came to be known over the years.

Cacciabaudo hopes that, like the victim’s family, the identification of of Heidi Blach brings him some closure also.